Increasing the number of direct broadcast satellite receiver systems in homes has required system cost to be reduced despite increases in features. Reduction of system cost has meant that efficient system design practices must be pursued which, in turn, has meant that a feature that would normally consume large amounts of memory or require fast processors must now use memory and processing power more efficiently. Display of character fonts on a display screen is one feature that has required adoption of efficient memory and processor use.
Unfortunately, a display screen composed of discrete display points or pixels will generally not be able to display a diagonal line without producing a jagged line which has a "staircase" appearance. Since the jagged appearance is undesirable, a variety of anti-aliasing techniques are used to visibly minimize the aliased effects.
To minimize memory requirements, some display systems store only one version of a character font and generate the other version as needed ("on the fly"). It is well known that generation of an anti-aliased font from an aliased font, or vice versa, is a computationally intensive task that requires an expensive and powerful processor. Display systems without strict constraints on memory and processing power typically store both versions of a character font. However, where both adequate processing power and memory are not available, a system will be limited to just one version of a font. Thus, it is desirable to provide the flexibility of minimizing both memory and processor requirements for systems that provide for the display of both aliased and anti-aliased characters.